Being Jewish and "Being Jewish"
Photo/Deborah Achtenberg.
By Deborah Achtenberg
My being Jewish during COVID-19 involves—humorously enough—writing an article on an essay entitled Being Jewish! In the essay and related works, Emmanuel Levinas (a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry) critiques existentialists for thinking solitude is freedom. Levinas thinks, instead, that solitude is a heavy responsibility. During COVID-19, we get a taste of what he means. By yourself (and I have been at home by myself), time flows differently. In fact, one minute or day seems to flow into another with no clear distinction. Every day is Blursday, people say.
I have worked against the blur by giving myself a schedule. It helps give some definition to my being. Every morning, I go into a special place in the front part of my house and say morning prayers while doing standing yoga—something I have done for years.
On Mondays, weather permitting, I garden all day. On Tuesdays through Thursdays, I work on research—for example, on my interpretation of “Being Jewish.” On Thursday mornings, in addition, I take a derbouka class on Facebook Live (derbouka is the drum I play on High Holidays) and, in the evening, meet with one of our congregants to teach her Torah trope for her adult Bat Mitzvah. We have finished now and soon I’ll be teaching trope to a younger Bat Mitzvah student. Before these Tuesdays-through-Thursdays, I do an hour of exercise classes online.
On Fridays, I get ready for Shabbat, cooking, straightening up, and basically doing whatever I feel like to get ready for the weekend. Friday night, I attend Sinai services on Facebook Live and Saturday mornings, I attend Sinai’s virtual Torah Study on Zoom. Led by our three rabbis, we are doing a close reading of Genesis guided by commentators, especially contemporary and medieval ones. After Torah Study, I call and chat with someone from Torah Study and then take a walk. On Sundays, I Zoom with a philosophy colleague in Haifa, and then I do whatever: meet, masked, with a friend or colleague in my backyard, catch up on the news, eat a nice meal, read a book, watch a movie, play derbouka, etc.
Along the way, once a week, I send an email to Torah Study participants with a summary of the last week’s discussion along with photos of two artworks by Jewish artists that relate to our discussion. I have learned a lot about Jewish art this year! Also, I make sure regularly to take a look online at what the local far-right is up to. If anything worrisome is going on, I tell our rabbis about it so they can keep themselves and the rest of us safe in these unstable times. In addition, once a month, I meet online with the religious practice committee. Finally, in the fall, I taught a High Holiday Sinai study course on forgiveness from Jewish sources.
What Levinas says about solitude is that at first it is a kind of freedom because, in it, I can decide what comes in and what comes out. In solitude, in a sense, I produce a self! Who am I? I’m the one who prays, reads and writes philosophy, studies Torah, plays derbouka, sits in my yard drinking a strong coffee before the start of my day. I’m the one who focuses on those things among all the things I could focus on. In prayer, I focus on God, my soul, my body, my house, my neighbor, and my thanks. Every day. In research, I focus on an idea. Every week. In Torah study, I focus on the text or on what the commentators say about it. In my yard, with my coffee, I let my mind wander a bit and focus on whatever. Glorious freedom—to determine who I am by what, in all the blur of existence, I focus on and make into myself.
But, though it is liberating to determine myself, instead—as everyone living alone during COVID-19 knows—it’s difficult! It’s difficult not just to wander around the house and around your mind not quite knowing what you’re doing or thinking or what is what. It’s hard to keep doing those things and not just blur out. What at first seems like the freedom of self-determination—of making yourself what you are—quickly seems like a job. It’s not something you just do once and it’s over. You have to keep doing it if you are to keep being what you are.
Except that there are moments when you do not have to do that work. There are moments when constant preoccupation with yourself is broken open by something—someone—that comes in from outside. A call with Torah Study friends who have surprising things to say. A discussion about Torah in which others open up new horizons. A conversation in the yard with a friend about something that hadn’t occurred to me. It’s only in relation to an other—to another person—that I am really free, Levinas says, free from the laborious preoccupation with my self.
Even more, there is no time without the other, Levinas says! Without another person, there’s only me, me, me. There’s no outside. There’s no distinction, even though I try hard to make distinctions through scheduling activities. Still I yearn for something outside me—for something that’s not just me, for something, or someone, who opens me up to something new. And so those moments with other people—talking to a colleague on the phone, chatting with a friend in the backyard, participating in Torah study or in services—are moments of opening to something new. How precious those moments are in the time of COVID-19, I think we all know. They give shape to time and to our self.
How does this relate to being Jewish (and “Being Jewish”)? Sartre’s wrong, Levinas says, that an authentic Jew is one who makes himself what he is and has no origin. Instead, what is original about being Jewish is “breaking with a world that is without origin.” For not only time but my very being requires relation with an other, an other without whom it’s all just a blur despite my efforts to give definition to things. I am not my own origin. I do not simply make myself. There’s no subjectivity without intersubjectivity, we might say—no self without an other. And so we say, every day, “Modah ani lifanekha melekh ḥai vekayam sheheḥezarta bi nishmati...” I give thanks to you, living sovereign, for returning to me my soul...” Every day, in other words, we give thanks to you for originating me. And that’s what it is to be Jewish according to Levinas—at any time including in the time of COVID-19.
Deborah Achtenberg has lived in Reno since 1982. She has been a choir member, Jewish Practice Committee member, trope teacher, and Torah Study corresponding secretary.
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